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The aim of this collaborative work is to examine the state of the Russian 20th-century poetic canon in the context of socio-political changes triggered by the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. This scholarly book clearly demonstrates the co-existence of competing views on the role of the canon in artistic production and the shaping of both national and transnational identities. The collected essays in this work are of interest to students and scholars specifically interested in Russian literature, and/or post-Soviet literary and cultural developments in Russia. However, they are also of value to anyone interested in the more general issue of cultural responses to rapid, far-reaching social change.

[Readers] will find a great deal of new and interesting information in this book ... considered and measured ... fascinating

—Michael Pursglove, East-West Review, 16.2 (2017), 36-37

The canon of Russian poetry has been reshaped since the fall of the Soviet Union. A multi-authored study of changing cultural memory and identity, this revisionary work charts Russia’s shifting relationship to its own literature in the face of social upheaval.

Literary canon and national identity are inextricably tied together, the composition of a canon being the attempt to single out those literary works that best express a nation’s culture. This process is, of course, fluid and subject to significant shifts, particularly at times of epochal change. This volume explores changes in the canon of twentieth-century Russian poetry from the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union to the end of Putin’s second term as Russian President in 2008. In the wake of major institutional changes, such as the abolition of state censorship and the introduction of a market economy, the way was open for wholesale reinterpretation of twentieth-century poets such as Iosif Brodskii, Anna Akhmatova and Osip Mandel′shtam, their works and their lives. In the last twenty years many critics have discussed the possibility of various coexisting canons rooted in official and non-official literature and suggested replacing the term "Soviet literature" with a new definition – "Russian literature of the Soviet period".

Contributions to this volume explore the multiple factors involved in reshaping the canon, understood as a body of literary texts given exemplary or representative status as "classics". Among factors which may influence the composition of the canon are educational institutions, competing views of scholars and critics, including figures outside Russia, and the self-canonising activity of poets themselves. Canon revision further reflects contemporary concerns with the destabilising effects of emigration and the internet, and the desire to reconnect with pre-revolutionary cultural traditions through a narrative of the past which foregrounds continuity. Despite persistent nostalgic yearnings in some quarters for a single canon, the current situation is defiantly diverse, balancing both the Soviet literary tradition and the parallel contemporaneous literary worlds of the emigration and the underground.

8. From Underground to Mainstream: The Case of Elena ShvartsJosephine von Zitzewitz

9. Boris Slutskii: A Poet, his Time, and the CanonKatharine Hodgson

10. The Diasporic Canon of Russian Poetry: The Case of the Paris Note Maria Rubins

11. The Thaw Generation Poets in the Post-Soviet PeriodEmily Lygo

12. The Post-Soviet Homecoming of First-Wave Russian Émigré Poets and its Impact on the Reinvention of the PastAlexandra Smith

13. Creating the Canon of the PresentStephanie Sandler

Bibliography
Index

Alexandra Harrington is Senior Lecturer in the School of Modern Languages and Cultures at Durham University. Her research focuses primarily on modern Russian poetry and literary culture, in particular the career of Anna Akhmatova, and she is currently writing a monograph on Russian literary fame and the phenomenon of literary celebrity. Alexandra is also working on a longer-term project, The Poem in the Eye: The Visual Dimension of Russian Poetry, which investigates Russian poetry from the seventeenth century to the present, with a focus on the different ways in which poems prompt the reader to visualise, and the varied relationships that exist between Russian poetry and the visual arts. Her publications include The Poetry of Anna Akhmatova: Living in Different Mirrors (2006) and ‘Anna Akhmatova’, in Stephen M. Norris and Willard Sunderland (eds.), Russia’s People of Empire: Life Stories from Eurasia, 1500 to the Present (2012). Email: a.k.harrington@durham.ac.uk

Katharine Hodgson’s research focuses on twentieth-century Russian poetry, particularly the complexities faced by writers during the Soviet period, and how attitudes towards the cultural legacy of the USSR have evolved since 1991. Katharine has published extensively on the topic, including with Alexandra Smith, The Twentieth-Century Russian Poetry Canon and Post-Soviet National Identity (2017) and Voicing the Soviet Experience: the Poetry of Ol´ga Berggol´ts (2003). Between 2010 and 2013 Katharine led a project funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), ‘Reconfiguring the Canon of Twentieth-Century Russian Poetry, 1991–2008’ (http://humanities.exeter.ac.uk/modernlanguages/russian/research/russianpoetrycanon), which has enabled her to examine how the twentieth-century poetry canon has been revised in recent years. This book is the fruit of this productive collaboration. Email: K.M.Hodgson@exeter.ac.uk

Aaron Tregellis Hodgson is currently writing his doctoral thesis, entitled ‘From the Margins to the Mainstream, or the Mainstream to the Margins? Joseph Brodsky’s Canonical Status in the West and Russia in the post-Soviet Period’. His doctoral research is funded by the AHRC as part of the project ‘Reconfiguring the Canon of Twentieth Century Russian Poetry, 1991–2008.’ Email: aaron.hodgson87@gmail.com

Andrew Kahn is Professor of Russian Literature at the University of Oxford. He has written widely about Russian Enlightenment literature, Pushkin, and modern poetry. He is completing a book about Mandelstam’s late poetry called Mandelstam and Experience: Poetry, Politics, Art. He has edited and introduced new translations of Lermontov, A Hero of Our Time and Leo Tolstoi, The Death of Ivan Ilyich and Other Stories, both for Oxford World’s Classics. Email: andrew. kahn@seh.ox.ac.uk

Natalia Karakulina completed her PhD at the University of Exeter. Her thesis ‘Representations of Vladimir Maiakovskii in the Post-Soviet Russian Literary Canon’ assembled evidence from a range of post-1991 publications to show how Maiakovskii’s position has been affected by the wide-ranging rejection of writers strongly associated with the official Soviet culture. The thesis contributes to the body of research analysing the development of Russian literary canon in the post-Soviet period. Email: N.Karakulina@exeter.ac.uk

Emily Lygo is Senior Lecturer in Russian at the University of Exeter. Her main research interests are Russian poetry especially of the Soviet period, Soviet literary politics and policy, literary translation in Russia and Anglo-Soviet relations. Her translation of Tatiana Voltskaia’s Cicada: Selected Poetry & Prose was published in 2006. She is also the author of Leningrad Poetry 1953–75: The Thaw Generation (2010), and The Art of Accommodation (2011). Email: E.F.Lygo@exeter.ac.uk

Maria Rubins is Senior Lecturer in Russian Literature and Culture at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies of University College London. She works on Russian literature and cultural history of the nineteenth to the twenty-first centuries, from a comparative and interdisciplinary perspective. In particular, her research interests include modernism, exile and diaspora, national and postnational cultural identities, the interaction between literature and other arts, canon formation, postcolonial, bilingual and transnational writing, Russian-French cultural relations, and Russian-language literature in Israel. Her most recent book is Russian Montparnasse: TransnationalWriting in Interwar Paris (2015; a revised and expanded Russian translation is forthcoming from the NLO Publishing House, Moscow). Email: m.rubins@ucl.ac.uk

Stephanie Sandler is Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures at Harvard University. Her research centres mainly on poetry and cinema. Stephanie has written about Pushkin and myths of Pushkin in Russian culture, and about the contemporary poetry of Russia and of the United States. She has a long-standing interest in women writers and in feminist theory, and her work also draws on psychoanalysis, philosophy, visual studies, and post-modernist theories. Stephanie is also a translator of Russian poetry. Her publications include Distant Pleasures: Alexander Pushkin and the Writing of Exile (1989); Commemorating Pushkin: Russia’s Myth of a National Poet (2004); and three edited collections: Rereading Russian Poetry (1999); Self and Story in Russian History (2000; with Laura Engelstein); and Sexuality and the Body in Russian Culture (1993; with Jane Costlow and Judith Vowles). Email: ssandler@fas.harvard.edu

Joanne Shelton has undertaken research into the role of educational institutions and publishers in the canon formation process. She has collated information for entry in the searchable bibliographical database of the ‘Reconfiguring the Canon of Twentieth Century Russian Poetry, 1991–2008’ project, which was designed to show quantitative changes in the prominence of a given poet in post-1991 publications, and the extent of his or her appearances in textbooks and literary histories.

Alexandra Smith is Reader in Russian Studies at the University of Edinburgh. Her research interests include literary and film theory, critical theory, Russian literature of the nineteenth to the twenty-first centuries, and the history of ideas and the interaction between literary and visual modes of artistic expression. Alexandra is the author of The Song of the Mockingbird: Pushkin in the Works of Marina Tsvetaeva (1994) and Montaging Pushkin: Pushkin and Visions of Modernity in Russian Twentieth-Century Poetry (2006). She has also written numerous articles on Russian literature and culture, as well as European and American literature. Currently she is working on several publications related to the AHRC project ‘Reconfiguring the Canon of Russian Twentieth-Century Poetry, 1991–2008’, in which she participated as Co-Investigator. Email: Alexandra.Smith@ed.ac.uk

Olga Sobolev is a Senior Lecturer in Russian and Comparative Literature at the London School of Economics and Political Science. She researches Russian and European culture of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Olga’s recent publications include From Orientalism to Cultural Capital: The Myth of Russia in British Literature of the 1920s (with Angus Wrenn, 2017), ‘Reception of Alfred Tennyson in Russia’, in Leonee Ormond (ed.), The Reception of Tennyson in Europe (2016), ‘The Only Hope of the World’: George Bernard Shaw and Russia (with Angus Wrenn, 2012), The Silver Mask: Harlequinade in the Symbolist Poetry of Blok and Belyi (2008) and articles on Leo Tolstoi, Fedor Dostoevskii, Vladimir Nabokov, Anton Chekhov, Boris Akunin and Viktor Pelevin. Email: o.sobolev@lse.ac.uk

Josephine von Zitzewitz is presently Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the Department of Slavonic Studies, Cambridge University, having previously held a lectureship at Oxford University. She is working on Leningrad samizdat, with a particular focus on samizdat journals, the networks that formed around them and their function as early social media. Her monograph on samizdat poetry, Poetry and the Leningrad Religious-Philosophical Seminar 1974–1980: Music for a Deaf Age was published in 2016, and she has written several articles on poetry and late Soviet culture. Her second interest is translation, and she envisages a new project bringing together young Russian poets, scholars and translators. Email: jhfv2@cam.ac.uk

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The introduction outlines the
circumstances surrounding the reconfiguration of the Russian twentieth-century
poetry canon since the early 1990s, and explores the complex factors at work in
a process which has not resulted in widespread consensus, but that has
underlined the extent of the cultural dislocations brought about by the years
of Soviet control. These include spatial dislocations, as poets were exiled or
emigrated; some enjoyed worldwide recognition, even as their work was unobtainable
at home. There were temporal dislocations too, as works unpublished for decades
after their composition finally emerged into print. Institutional and other
structures with a potential to help shape the canon underwent dramatic
transformations during the Soviet period. The academy and publishing were
conscripted to impose the state-approved version of the canon; individual poets
and groups of poets found their opportunities to propose their own canons and
assert their own canonical status severely curtailed. In the post-Soviet era an
array of previously isolated canons–official, underground, emigre, created by
critics abroad–emerged in a new and uncertain cultural environment, exposed to
the conflicting agendas of a publishing market and competing literary groups.
The ways in which the poetry canon is being reshaped reflect contemporary
concerns with the destabilising effects of emigration and the internet, and the
desire to reconnect with pre-revolutionary cultural tradition through a
narrative of the past which foregrounds continuity. Despite persistent
nostalgic yearnings in some quarters for a single canon, the current situation
demonstrates the canon’s post-Soviet mutability and multiplicity.

CHAPTER
II

Aaron
Tregellis Hodgson, ‘From the margins to the mainstream: Joseph Brodsky and the
20th century poetic canon in the post-Soviet period’

This
title alludes to one of Brodsky’s early poems (1962), and seems almost
prophetic, marking his rise from near obscurity to fame in post-Soviet Russia.
The chapter contextualizes Brodsky’s rise in post-Soviet Russia, as well as
investigate the literary and extra-literary mechanisms at play in his
canonization. The two parts of the chapter mirror the two stages of Brodsky’s
canonization in Russia, using both a quantitative and qualitative methodology.
The first part focuses on the immediate post-Soviet period, tracing Brodsky’s
initial reception and noting the importance of such criteria as his biography,
awards, and the de-Sovietisation that was taking place at the time. The second
part concentrates on his posthumous reception and canonization, and aims to
demonstrate that since Brodsky’s death in 1996 there has been a change in the
post-Soviet Russian poetic canon to incorporate him.

CHAPTER
III

Alexandra
Harrington, '”Golden-Mouthed Anna of All The Russias”': Canon, Canonization,
and Cult’

This chapter argues that Akhmatova's
pre-eminent status in the contemporary canon rests not only on poetic talent
but on extra-literary factors and processes which have elevated her to a form
of secular sainthood. It explores the role played by biographies, critical
studies, museums, and iconography in organising and generating her 'meaning' as
cultural icon, and discusses the auto-canonization and self-mythologization strategies
she employed to cultivate the paradoxical image of herself as victimized martyr
and triumphant survivor. Akhmatova has become a compelling role model and icon
for the post-Soviet intelligentsia, having successfully inscribed herself into
a hitherto almost exclusively male tradition of Russian poet as heroic fighter
against tyranny through a form of passive resistance which her gender made
available to her. The chapter culminates in readings of two poetic works which
have a particular canon-making thrust, 'Nas chetvero' and Poema bez geroia, and proposes a way of accounting for the
canonical status of Akhmatova's major cycle Rekviem
through its mnemonic qualities.

CHAPTER
IV

Natalia
Karakulina, ‘Vladimir Maiakovskii and the national school curriculum’

This chapter investigates the way the most
canonical Soviet poet Vladimir Maiakovskii is represented in the post-Soviet
school curriculum, looking at material from textbooks, teaching supplements,
final exam questions etc. After a brief outline of Maiakovskii’s place in the
Soviet school curriculum, the chapter analyses changes in his representation
during the early 1990s when classic Soviet authors were sidelined, as well as
more recent shifts which have restored Maiakovskii to the position of a major
Russian poet. Since the late 1990s Maiakovskii’s love lyrics, largely ignored
in the Soviet curriculum, have come to the forefront, and teachers have created
an image of Maiakovskii which contradicts his Soviet legend, representing him
as an insecure and tragic figure. The chapter argues that in spite of claims
that this version is historically accurate, students at school are offered a
one-sided representation of Maiakovskii which avoids discussion of the
complexities that characterised the poet’s life and convictions.

CHAPTER
V

Olga
Sobolev, The Symbol of the Symbolists: Alexander Blok in the changing Russian
literary canon’

The focus of this chapter is a comparative
analysis of Alexander Blok’s critical reception within the framework of the
Soviet and post-Soviet literary canon. Blok was the only Symbolist author
successfully inscribed in the Soviet literary paradigm, thus presenting an
indicative example of so-called ideologically driven canonisation – when the
legacy of an author is reduced to art with a social function and he becomes a
mouthpiece for a specific social group. The Soviet authorities represented Blok as a harbinger of
revolution, while intelligentsia circles promoted his image as a refined
aesthete. A more holistic outlook can be traced in post-Soviet
times, but the main emphasis still remains inseparable from the configuration
of the socio-political field: the prominence of Gnostic trends in Symbolist
writing, highlighted by the revisionist spirit of the 1990s, has recently been
replaced by a growing interest in their theosophical platform, in the line with
the consolidation of the national idea in Putin’s Russia.

CHAPTER
VI

Andrew
Kahn, ‘Canonical Mandel′shtam’

Mandel′shtam’s recognition as a premier
Russian poet developed posthumously and largely outside the Soviet Union. The
deepest record of engagement with his legacy lies in the world of
Anglo-American letters, by writers and critics including Henry Gifford, Seamus
Heaney, Geoffrey Hill, Robert Lowell, Donald Davie and Joseph Brodsky. This
chapter analyses this material as evidence of why the history of Mandel′shtam’s
reputation spheres has significant implications for how we think about the
mechanisms of canon-formation and poetic afterlives. The specific development
of Mandel′shtam studies, with its critical views on his poetic technique, and
the question of his poetic difficulty, will feature only as a subsidiary
treatment to the main narrative of reputation building. The larger tendencies
that emerge as patterns in this reception emanate from convictions about poetry
and the role of the poet. To a large degree, the story is part of the chapter
of Russia abroad and the recovery of silenced voices in the diaspora.

CHAPTER
VII

Denis
Akhapkin, ‘Joseph Brodsky and the Russian poetry canon’

This chapter shows how Brodsky constructs
his own version of the Russian twentieth-century poetry canon and builds his
own work into this canon. Since the mid-1960s, the poet uses subtexts and
allusions in his own poems to create an implied image of the canon, which he
makes explicit in his essays. In his poems Brodsky suggests his own position in
the canon, as he reframes and transforms quotations from what he considers
canonical Russian poems of the 20th century, creating a sense of something
familiar which makes readers want to find out the origins of the text.
Brodsky’s canonical thinking is clearly demonstrated, too, in his efforts to
set out a definitive list of poets and texts in something approaching
‘Brodsky’s canon’, which, because of the poet’s popularity and authority among
Russian readers, has had a significant effect on perceptions of the canon of
twentieth-century Russian poetry.

CHAPTER
VIII

Joanne
Shelton, ‘Ivan Bunin and the process of establishing his place in the
post-Soviet canon of twentieth-century poetry’

This chapter explores the post-Soviet
canonisation of the first Russian winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature,
Ivan Bunin. Although he is more widely recognised as a prose writer, Bunin’s
poetry is featuring more widely as part of the canon of Russian poetry of the
twentieth century. This chapter will explore some of the ways in which the re-canonisation
process has taken place and argue that the institutional model of canon
formation, coupled with the ‘Bunin institution’, is currently having a more
significant impact on Bunin’s canonicity than the poet-based model of
canonisation. Furthermore, the chapter will seek to establish whether Bunin’s
re-canonisation can be attributed solely to these models of canonisation, or
whether other factors, such as good fortune or representativeness, have also
influenced his canonical status.

This chapter examines the enormous
popularity of Elena Shvarts (1944 – 2010) in the 1990s and 2000s. Shvarts began
her career in the Leningrad literary underground of the 1970s, which was then
marginalised, but now recognised as one of the canonical trends in late 20th
century Russian poetry, a judgement confirmed by numerous academic studies that
define the Leningrad underground as integral to Russian postmodernism. This
chapter argues that Shvarts was the only member of her peer group (Viktor
Krivulin, Sergei Stratanovskii, Oleg Okhapkin and Alexander Mironov) who also
entered the canon of post-Soviet Russia, instead of being only canonised as a
1970s underground poet. This is indicated with the help of a comparative
bibliography of critical writings on these five poets; the subsequent sections
are devoted to the analysis of key features of Shvarts’s poetics and person
that might account for her accessibility and relevance beyond the Soviet
context.

CHAPTER
X

Katharine
Hodgson, ‘Boris Slutskii: a poet, his time, and the canon’

While the bulk
of Slutskii’s poetry remains little known, he is represented in the canon by
poems emphasising his role as a chronicler of the Soviet experience, and so
risks being seen as a figure of limited relevance in the post-Soviet age. This
chapter explores three dominant themes in post-Soviet discussions of Slutskii’s
significance as a poet: his allegiance to the Communist Party, his Jewish
identity, and his poetics. It investigates the extent to which changes in the
canon have made it possible to read Slutskii outside the interpretative models
that have dominated his reception so far. It assesses whether the most
prominent view of his work as testimony to the upheavals of his times has been
challenged, or at least supplemented by the view of Slutskii as the link
between the early twentieth-century avant-garde and the Soviet underground, and
of Slutskii as both a Russian and a Jewish poet.

Focusing on the Paris Note group of Russian émigré poets that
was formed in inter-war France, this chapter investigates the relationship
between the younger émigré poets, who shared a distinctly transnational, hybrid
and deracinated identity, and the Russian canon, master narrative, and poetic
tradition, and considers how European and French poetic canons and cultural
trends shaped the Paris Note poets’ aesthetic self-definition. It traces their
revision of the classical Russian canon, as reflected in their meta-discourse and
intertextual allusions in their verse, as well as the parameters of Paris Note
poetic canon, as articulated by the mentor of the group, Georgii Adamovich, and
as interpreted in the praxis of the younger émigré poets. The chapter will
examine the place occupied by the Paris Note poets, for many years excluded
from publication in Russia, in the revised twentieth-century poetry canon.

CHAPTER
XII

Emily
Lygo, ‘The Thaw generation poets in the post-Soviet period’

By the 1980s,
the canon of poets for the Thaw generation had largely settled, and included
poets already established before the Khrushchev Thaw such as Tvardovskii,
Martynov and Tikhonov and poets who began publishing and became well known
during the Thaw, principally Evtushenko, Voznesenskii, Akhmadulina, Okudzhava
and Rozhdestvenskii. This chapter examines various ways in which this canon of
this younger generation has been reconfigured since perestroika, examining
contrasting representations not only of the canon of poets but also of the
narrative of poetry in this period. Drawing on evidence from school and
university syllabuses, anthologies published in the West and Russia, and
criticism and comment of influential figures, it argues that the differences
between conceptions of both the canon and the significance of Thaw poetry for
Russian literature reveal that there is still much uncertainty about the status
and value of Soviet literature in the post-Soviet period.

CHAPTER
XIII

Alexandra
Smith, ‘The post-Soviet homecoming of First-Wave Russian émigré poets and its
impact on the reinvention of the past’

This chapter focuses on the
post-Soviet reception of the poetry of Russian émigré authors, examining the
visibility of poets such as Tsvetaeva, Khodasevich, Georgii Ivanov and Nabokov
in the contemporary Russian cultural landscape. It draws on Edith Clowes’s
emphasis on the impact of spatial categories on the process of formation of a
new national identity in the post-Soviet period, and develops Greta Slobin’s
views on the importance of the First Wave Russian emigration to Russian
cultural trends in the 1990s-2000s, when the recovery of émigré literature
became associated with the quest for a new national identity. This quest was
entwined with various forms of nostalgia, including imperial, orthodox, and
post-communist. The chapter focuses on the widespread popularity of Tsvetaeva’s
poetry, autobiographical fiction and essays in the post-Soviet period and
argues that Tsvetaeva’s own striving for a national unity and the opposition to
Soviet ideology embedded in her works enabled her to become a living link
between today’s Russia and pre-revolutionary Russia, images of which are
presented in Tsvetaeva’s works in an elegiac and romanticised manner.

CHAPTER
XIV

Stephanie
Sandler, ‘Creating the canon of the present’

Canonizing
poetry at the moment of its creation may be a fool’s errand, but some important
benefits arise from trying to do so. Two key features of current poetry are
aesthetic openness (poems that absorb traits from other artistic formats), and
multiple forms of border-crossing (poems that originate in multiple national
tradition). Such poems now abound, but they existed earlier, if less
prominently. Work to canonize the present can thus shine different lights on
the past. The chapter also offers a provisional structure to canonize the
present. It suggests five organizing rubrics, and offers examples of each:
language crossings and quasi-translations; the role of audiences outside Russia
in canonization; visual poetry; story-telling to the point where narrative
overtakes poetic traits; and performance poetry. Among the poets featured are
Eremin, L’vovskii, Brodsky, Kaminsky, Aygi, Mnatsakanova, Stepanova,
Svarovskii, Fanailova, Barskova, and Prigov.